over the last three years we found over two hundred of these things and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for tedof these six the first one that we 're going to talk about is in the black envelope you 're holding it comes from a company in japan called geltech now go ahead and open it upbe sure and take the two pieces apartwhat 's unexpected about this is that it 's softbut it 's also a strong magnet zach and i have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this we spent a long time thinking about why this is and it 's just recently that we realizedas you 're seeing this gel magnet for the first time if you assume that all magnets had to be hard then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could workso a first idea is to useimagine taking the same material but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker you know this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door in your closet and you could literally stickyour shoes up instead of using a shelfand you could see it in his face roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folderthese things just get him really excited and so we 're looking at these conceptsand as we thought about it more we realized that it let you fill in all the detailsabout the experience just as if you saw it on tvso for ted we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with roman and his team at the directors bureauso i just want to quickly explain how this would workthis is the magnetically levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial the gel that you 're holding would be lining the bottom of the board now this is important for two reasons one the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that if it were to hit the rider in the headit wouldn 't injure him in addition you can see from the diagram on the right the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet so this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you 're going down the force of the water rushing down in addition to that repulsion force would make this slide go faster than any slide on the marketit 's because of this that you need the magnetic braking systembut something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube so we set up a quick experiment here to show that to younow you see the magnet fell really slowlyto hold any position in betweenin our brainstorms we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal so at the end of the game you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bagwe decided to go out onto the streets of chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with thiswe need you to stand right in front of the ted signso describe to the audiencethe temperature of your shirt go aheadit 's odorless it 's colorlessit 's so safe you could drink this stuffwhat 's the significance of this dry liquid early versions of the fluid were actually used on a cray supercomputernow the unexpected thing about this is that zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectlyinnocent member of the audience without any concern that we 'd damage the electronics that we 'd get him wet that we 'd hurt the books or the computersit works because it 's non conductive so you can see here you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it wouldn 't cause any damage you can circulate it to draw the heat away but today it 's most widely used in office buildings in the sprinkler system as a fire suppression fluid again it 's perfectly safe for people it puts out the fires doesn 't hurt anythingbut our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game so during halftime it could rain down on the players cool everyone down and in a matter of minutes it would dry wouldn 't hurt the courtone of their r d engineers was working on a way to make plastic stifferso you see there it didn 't bounce backnow think about your interactions with aluminum foil shape retaining is common in metal you bend a piece of aluminum foil and it holds its place contrast that with a plastic garbage can and you can push in the sides and it always bounces backtaking it a little further if you wove those strips together kind of like a little basket you could make a shape retaining sheet and then you could embed it in a cloth so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table so that way on a windy day it wouldn 't blow awayfor our next technology it 's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself because it 's an ink so we 've prepared a video to show it applied to papernow to think about the potential for thisthink of all the places ink is supplied on business cards on the back of cereal boxes board games any place you use ink you could change the way you interact with itthis could totally change the way that you interface with paperyou see the dark line on the side and the top as you turn the pages of the book the book can actuallydetect what page you 're on based on the curvature of the pagesin addition if you were to fold in one of the corners then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notesdon 't let milk spoil your morningbeyond just detecting spoiled food it 's really where the significance of it lieshis company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene and he kind of comically explained that time after time what the firemen would say is they would rush to the scene of the crime they would look around if there were no dead policemen it was ok to goso a patient can come in and actually blow into their deviceby detecting the odor of particular bacteria or virusesor even lung cancerthe dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results this can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patientscurrently they 're using a method of trial and error but this could tell you precisely what disease you haveprior to seeing this we would have assumed a ten foot pole couldn 't fit in your pocket something as inexpensive as ink couldn 't sense the way paper is being bent every one of these things and we 're constantlytrying to find moreone of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand the sand that doesn 't get wet he said that he was playing with it with his son and you know his son was mesmerized because he would dunk it in the water he would take it out and it was bone dryafter hearing that story that really summed it up for methank you very much ks thank you生词表: